| A surface composed of cylinders |  |
| A cool way to make impressive objects. Without knowing the way to do this, I would ask myself "damn how was it done?". As for the car (tubes on surface) you could put these cylinder over the surface and keep it. Make Special text FX or any other things. |  |
| From nurbs or meshes |
 | 1 - Here is the object, we want to put these small cylinders on it, this is a solid, that mean the object is composed by a few surface joinned together. Some of these surface can be trimmed. 2 - make "dir" on the solid and be shure to have all the normals not pointing inside. You have to click on each part of the solid to check each surface.
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 | - We could use a mesh as a starting object but to have a nurbs object is perfect to control the number of these cylinders. |
 | 3 - Then we can convert the solid to a mesh, each facet of the mesh will have one cylinder on it, so I wouldn't recommand to make a multi thousand of polygons mesh, it could take a while to export and import and render all this, so keep quite and just try to get a nice mesh with square as facets. Use the "NurbsToMesh" command to convert the nurbs to mesh and Uncheck the "Refine" option, to get some regulard facets it's necessary to play with the parameters of the dialog box. set the angle to "0" and define the maximum and maximum edge lenght, this will define the size of each facet. We can check and control the number of vertices and facets from the Rhino prompt line. |
 | 4 - Select the mesh - Show the vertice with "Pon" - select all the points with a rectangle selection or with "selpoint" - show the normals with "ShowMeshNormals". |
 | 5 - "ShowMeshNormals" has created a nurbs perpendicular line on each polygon. You may delete some of them. 6 - Select the mesh with "Selmesh", to try to click on it in the middle of all these polygons could be annoying so this command is usefull. Now you can delete it and export all the lines to render them with Max. |
| Renaud DELCUZE ©Alliance Production 1999 Rhino/Max 3D House |